


dead it, forget it, let it all disappear

by deadwine



Series: 17hols prompt fills [2]
Category: EXO (Band), SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Canon Compliant, Idols, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Pining, Possibly Unrequited Love, Unhappy Ending, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 15:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28672806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadwine/pseuds/deadwine
Summary: That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it?You aren’t getting over him.Or: At 20, Minghao wakes up to a strange sensation: love. He never sleeps again.
Relationships: Xu Ming Hao | The8/Zhang Yi Xing | Lay
Series: 17hols prompt fills [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2099856
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11
Collections: Seventeen Holidays





	dead it, forget it, let it all disappear

**Author's Note:**

> written for 17hols round one on [dreamwidth](https://17hols.dreamwidth.org/3914.html?thread=63818#cmt63818) for this prompt:
>
>>   
> This is the model I propose. You are arriving home and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house.
>> 
>> -Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 and ½ Chapters  
> 
> 
> for some reason, those lines took me to [Anne Carson's The Glass Essay](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48636/the-glass-essay) and here we are. was also thinking of the bbb prompts: homesick but no idea what home is, no vocabulary for your existential crisis. 

Award shows in China are a strange beast Minghao is yet to tame. The years away stick to the surface of his skin in the most viscid manner as he mills around people who can’t help knowing him and yet pretend to forget. Seoul lingers on his tongue like the remains of a bitter pill scraped off the roof of a mouth and he can’t taste it himself but he catches glimpses of it in every discerning gaze, the dismissive touches to his elbow as people bypass him politely.

Sometimes he thinks it's because this dance is a tango he is doomed to fail without Junhui’s wandering arm clinging to his shoulder and a dozen texts on the phone from Seungcheol hyping them both up before they step onto the coiffed carpet. He even craves the occasional appearance of Yanan or Renjun, as they become, here too, a bridge to the past.

A hand lands on his shoulder and stays. Minghao turns to find himself face to face with Radouk’s toothy grin. They’ve been acquainted only a couple months but Radouk’s excitement is infectious, it’s what got Minghao into the studio with him in the first place. Minghao’s answering smile slips when he finds himself pulled away from his shaded spot in the corner—

“Where are we going... _hey_ —”

Radouk’s response is offered to everyone around them as much as Minghao, “I want you to meet someone, I think he could really turn around track six. _God_ how long have we been stuck on it anyway?”

Minghao’s cheeks colour and he tries to tamp down the growing irritation at being dragged around and having his production troubles aired to all the _disinterested_ ears around them that perk up.

Radouk lands him right in the middle of the fanfare— people are packed so closely there is barely space for a loud laugh to slip through and Minghao sighs, half in the mood to wrench free and go back when Radouk stops, halting their momentum. The breath rushing out of him is discomfiting— foreboding as the all too familiar back Radouk taps on.

His eyes drop to the dimple on Yixing’s cheek, like they could capture the imprints of Minghao’s fingers even after all this time and it allows Minghao to catch Yixing’s smile falter, just a little until it’s forced even brighter, _nicer_. Minghao knows precisely what a face that desires for the one staring back to be a stranger looks like.

A buzz of static sounds in his ears— the flicker when a radio station changes frequencies and every turn of the dial feels like a betrayal.

Radouk cuts in. “This is— well, I’m sure you know who this is— “

* * *

At eighteen, Minghao meets the love of his life. He doesn’t know it yet, of course. Korean music shows are hardly romantic places. Empty green rooms and unused bathrooms are passed down like trade secrets and yet convenience, lust, _passion_ are hardly signs of a love worthwhile— or so Minghao believes, then.

For a group debuting by the skin of their teeth, music shows are hunger— look at us, _no, not the scuffed soles on our shoes or the bruises blooming where the cheap concealer gives way,_ look at _us_ — and more hunger. Emptiness doesn’t sit well on an empty stomach but tears don’t feed boys and so they persist, no one daring to break the silence that presses on their shoulders despite wanting to know: _is this all there is?_

_Have we made it?_

* * *

They meet six months later when Minghao is more nerves than boy and decades after he’ll look back to that moment and remember everything except what they said to each other, a silent film made in the startling colour of his yearning. After the customary introductions and bowing when they were pushed together like exotic items on a menu usually are, he makes up for Minghao and Junhui’s silence with a confident yet abashed warmth that Minghao doesn’t notice, strung up as he is over things to come.

Minghao knew who he was, hard not to as a musician, especially an export that spoke the same language. But the minutes before their first performance at an award show was no time for that recognition to hold forth in their gaze and before he knew it they were separated.

Much of what follows is prefaced in that first meeting— moments slipping away like sand between his fingers.

* * *

Minghao is almost twenty when he wakes up one morning and finds that he’s in love.

“Love... _love_ ,” Mingyu mouths the syllable clumsily despite his own insistence that he learn what Minghao is made up of— for now, _butterflies._

“Already?” Mingyu switches back to Korean to ask, lips parted in concern that visibly struggles to be let out.

Mingyu isn’t what Mingyu becomes to him, not yet and Minghao lets the question lie. It doesn’t mean he rests any easier.

It’s not that Yixing is the first person besides Junhui that smells of home, embracing the scent for all its pungency as he steers Minghao from restaurant to restaurant under the starlight, every single one of them a relic of his own loneliness— Yixing flavoured breadcrumbs littered across Seoul that Minghao will retrace over and over, clinging to Seoul, like the memories cling to him, even after there was nothing left for him there.

Yixing goes off on a world tour and texts him pictures of cities that light up for him: Bangkok, Taipei, Hokkaido. Seoul itself sees its own extravaganza— they have KSPO and the local news buzzing for days and Minghao comes to practice one morning to catch Chan halfway through Monster’s choreo, a sheepish smile sent his way when their eyes meet in the mirror.

Once the tour officially begins, Minghao crouches next to Hansol’s bed with his phone plugged in, his body travelling time to keep up with Yixing’s life despite itself being holed inside their tiny apartment. Seokmin gushes over his quiet enthusiasm and Mingyu ribs him every chance he gets but his attention is always on Junhui, his smile strained like a sore back— as if at twenty-one he already knows all too well how love is never linear for people who fall in love differently.

* * *

Minghao doesn’t recall where Yixing is when Pretty U brings them their first music show win. The host calls their name and even before surprise, there is delight— his arms around Soonyoung, Chan, Junhui as they jump in gleeful disbelief. And then Seuncheol crumbles and the rest follow like a pack of dominoes. Minghao stands behind Seungcheol, a comforting hand on Seugcheol’s shoulder and watches the faces he has learnt like the back of his hand take a new form: _we’ve made it_ , they say.

Minghao’s voice is steady as he thanks their fans in his native tongue, Junhui dishing out the most confident Korean he’s heard him utter yet when the mike comes to them. His eyes stay dry, past the encore and the group hugs, Seokmin and Mingyu begrudgingly lending a shoulder to each other on the ride back home.

It takes a whole week for him to realise the pangs stretching his ribs apart is just homesickness. He grabs Junhui and goes out the first opportunity he gets. On a whim, he texts Yixing.

* * *

Yixing performs for the last time with his group at Quezon City but the rumours eat at Minghao long before Yixing takes a final bow, anticipating him in the crevices of the entertainment world he has always chosen to avoid, that he would still pull away from but for Yixing.

Yixing is in Seoul shortly prior to that and Minghao finds himself in Hokkaido, a direct reversal of six months ago. Minghao waits for the impending announcement with the camera focused on every purse of his lips— a trainwreck waiting to happen caught on film for posterity. The footage of his internal breakdown goes live the day Yixing officially goes back to China.

* * *

The bars fill up and fade out, his phone flickers in and out of service as his only tether to Yixing.

Minghao turns twenty-one, then twenty-two. Yixing never falls in love with him.

Seokmin brushes his hair out of his eyes one night, after Minghao has brought his wine-induced sobs into his bed.

“You still aren’t over him, Myungho-yah?”

Minghao never—

* * *

When Yixing texts him, right after it’s official, Minghao congratulates him on becoming a successful enough soloist to promote all by himself in spite of a spot on a team reserved for him for good. He asks for pictures of Anshan, what it looks like now. Minghao has not been home in almost five years.

When Yixing leaves him a solitary _Bye_ , he thinks: _we have barely sung_ ; he thinks— _we haven’t even begun yet_.

* * *

Sometimes, love feels like running to catch someone who’s about to board a flight but having them walk right past you as you search every face at the wrong terminal for a glimpse of theirs.

* * *

Minghao walks back into Yixing’s life— into China— as a mentor. They greet each other like the old friends that they perhaps are but some of Mingyu’s pettiness has surely rubbed off on him because he thrives on every young trainee that looks at him how they would look at Yixing— how _he_ has always peered at Yixing: eager, wanting, waiting.

There is no friction. How can there be when these many years down the line Yixing still doesn’t know?

And Minghao knows how this job works, knows how to keep it professional until the last night of shooting when he’s knocking on Yixing’s hotel room door.

“What are you doing here?” Trepidation mars Yixing’s features briefly as Minghao walks in.

He has nothing to fear.

For the first and last time, Minghao asks of him a favour and for all his reluctance, Yixing obliges— he steps around the ruins of Minghao’s heart and pulls Minghao’s body in. Something presses down on Minghao’s open wound— convenience or lust or passion, he doesn’t know.

That night, willing himself to watch as the nightmares of his future are created, Minghao learns all there is of love, and its necessities.

* * *

Radouk’s gaze on him is expectant.

Minghao forces a feeble attempt at polite confusion onto his face. “Zhang Yixing— Lay the producer, am I right?”

Yixing’s widening smile is a double-edged sword.

Maybe this is what it means to grow up, Minghao muses, to estrange yourself from known faces in alien crowds with the mere twist and turn of your mouth.

* * *

_I will confuse work and life sometimes._

Minghao reads, sitting on a make-up chair getting ready for their last show in Bangkok before they headed home for the year. He reads those lines once again and wonders which one he counted as, if he was the reason the lines got drawn in the first place or if he marked the blurred spaces in between. He reads on.

_Can I keep it real? I want a girlfriend._

* * *

Two flights meet mid-air, one enroute Seoul, another Anshan.

**Author's Note:**

> title from the lyrics of waiting for the end by linkin park  
> the lines quoted in the summary are from The Glass Essay  
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/deadseoull)  
> [cc](https://curiouscat.me/deadwine)


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